Many types of beverage makers are adapted to make various types of beverages. Especially in beverage makers which are adapted to receive and process members containing one or more beverage ingredients, the type of beverage which is made by the beverage maker is dependent on the type of beverage ingredient containing member as applied by a user of the beverage maker. For example, when a user decides to apply a member containing grind coffee, the beverage maker is used to make coffee, and when a user decides to apply a member containing tea leafs, the same beverage maker is used to make tea.
Each type of beverage requires a specific set of parameters in respect of the process of making the beverage, in order to obtain a required quality (taste) of the beverage. Such parameters may be temperature, flow, pressure and/or quantity of water which is to be conducted through the beverage ingredient containing member in this process, variation of the temperature, flow and/or pressure over time, pre-wetting parameters, pumping time, etc. In order to achieve that the beverage maker is capable of automatically selecting the proper parameters in respect of at least one beverage ingredient containing member which needs to be processed by the beverage maker, it is necessary that the beverage maker is capable of recognizing the beverage ingredient containing member.
A system for automatically preparing a range of beverage types from a range of beverage cartridges is known from US 2004/0197444. This system comprises a beverage preparation machine and a plurality of beverage cartridges, each cartridge containing one or more beverage ingredients associated with a specific beverage type. For the purpose of preparing a beverage by means of the system, a user inserts a beverage cartridge in the beverage preparation machine and operates the machine to supply to the beverage cartridge water or another suitable medium, as a result of which a beverage is produced from the one or more beverage ingredients contained in the beverage cartridge.
For the purpose of recognizing the beverage cartridge and performing a suitable brewing cycle, the beverage preparation system known from US 2004/0197444 comprises a reader in the beverage preparation machine for automatically interpreting a code written on the beverage cartridge, and processing means for creating a specific brewing cycle based on this code. In a practical embodiment of the system, the reader may be an optical barcode reader, and the code written on the beverage cartridge may be a printed barcode.
Although the known system having means for recognizing beverage cartridges functions quite well in practice, there are a number of disadvantages associated with it. In the first place, only beverage cartridges having a code written on it can be used and automatically recognized in the beverage preparation machine of the system, wherein this code needs to be a specific code which is stored in a memory of the processing means. In the second place, the code reader is a specific component in the beverage preparation machine, which is only used for the purpose of reading the cartridge information. By applying such a component, which would otherwise not need to be part of the beverage maker, a cost price of the system is raised.